Omitting chapter stops / selection menu - what's your view?

[ravenus]

There seems to be a new trend of omitting chapter stops or at least a selection menu. I have noticed this in Naked Prey and Dragon Inn from Eureka (Masters of Cinema), BFI's release of The Day The Earth Caught Fire, Sony UK did this for Sense & Sensibility and Remains of The Day.

I have to ask, is this something so technically demanding or expensive to implement that studios would wilfully choose to leave it out of the authoring process? There are many reasons why we may not manage or even choose to watch a movie in its entirety in one go - Sometimes I fall asleep while watching a movie because I'm too tired and go back to it later, sometimes I may want to watch / show off a particular scene. In such cases, a chapter selection menu is a great convenience, more tangibly useful than a slipcover or a steelbook.

I'm having a poll to see how many people share this view and conversely, how many think it's not relevant. Please vote your preference and hopefully at least the smaller / boutique labels will get some useful feedback from us about this practice.

[DaveSimonH]

I would prefer to have a chapter points & menu there as an option, but have to admit I'm not sure I'd miss it if it wasn't there. If I'm tired for instance, I'll take a note of current time stamp in my phone and then turn it off. Then later I can navigate there quickly, if the disc does't allow for resuming playback.

A bigger annoyance personally is when releases don't have subtitles. I've gotten into the habit of enabling English subs, as it allows me to watch something at a lower level to not disturb others, or just to help with mumbling actors.
If I look online and can't find subtitles, fair enough, I'm sure it is time consuming/expensive to produce and sync one from scratch. But if I with a google search can find SRT files for NTSC, PAL, multiple languages etc. then at that point, it seems like the studio made a conscious choice to not include subtitles. I imagine its especially frustrating for people who are hard of hearing, deaf, viewers for which its a 2nd language etc.

[Ste7en]

I use them a lot. I'd be lost without them. Stupid idea to ditch them in all honesty. Wasn't Mulholland Drive on DVD an early example of them not being used?

Just sounds like penny pinching to me.

Besides, imagine demos without them

[ravenus]

Originally Posted by DaveSimonH

I would prefer to have a chapter points & menu there as an option, but have to admit I'm not sure I'd miss it if it wasn't there. If I'm tired for instance, I'll take a note of current time stamp in my phone and then turn it off. Then later I can navigate there quickly, if the disc does't allow for resuming playback.

That works if you were sufficiently alert to stop it just as you were nodding off. To me it often happens that a couple scenes (or more) have gone by when I realize I've dozed off, or if it's towards the end of the film (as happened recently with Dragon Inn), I wake up to find the main menu. Then I have to start the movie from the beginning and keep skipping till I reach the place I last remember

[Bumblefeet]

I haven't noticed them missing on feature films but on extras that tend to run close to an hour I'm always annoyed when they are missing. You have to fast forward to the whole thing as I can't jump to a time code with my player.

[DaveSimonH]

Originally Posted by MichaelB

Bear in mind that online SRT files might be wildly unsuitable.

Because a transcription wasn't supplied with the film, I made the mistake of using an online file as the basis of the subtitles for The Long Good Friday, and it would honestly have been quicker to transcribe the whole thing from scratch. I'm guessing they were transcribed by an American with no ear for broad East London, because some of the guesses were hilarious - my favourite being a reference to "your scarce ears", which the transcriber presumably thought was a slang term meaning "deaf". The owner of the ears in question was the renowned Liverpudlian thespian Paul Barber, and the word was clearly "Scouse".

And shortly after that scene, Harold Shand hands some money over to some kids outside and says, according to the original subtitles, "Don't get drunk" - although to my decidedly unscarce ears he's actually clearly saying "Go and get drunk", which would make a lot more contextual sense.

Oh, and the original source was the US version of the film, so some of the subtitles were substantially different anyway, although this wasn't the transcriber's fault this time.

I think it took about eight hours of solid work (all of it billable) just to render them usable, and that was prior to the syncing.

Well I'm sure there are plenty of people that benefited from all your hard work, including I'm sure some people that struggle with some of the accents, like the original author of those subs
Accuracy is certainly something crucial for subtitles, I remember years ago watching Optimum's release of First Blood (when I picked up the 4 film boxset) and having to turn off the subtitles as they were wildly inaccurate. I can only guess it was translated to English from one of the other subtitle options on the disc.

[adamhopelies]

I too am somewhere in the middle. While I do find them useful I don't mind if they're omitted, especially if it's in an effort to cut costs (I'd much rather they were gone over say, a reduction in the number of pages in a booklet).

[adamhopelies]

Originally Posted by Ste7en

I use them a lot. I'd be lost without them. Stupid idea to ditch them in all honesty. Wasn't Mulholland Drive on DVD an early example of them not being used?

With Mulholland Dr. it is an artistic statement from the director. Not only does it lack a menu but it doesn't have any chapter stops at all.

[Ste7en]

Originally Posted by adamhopelies

With Mulholland Dr. it is an artistic statement from the director. Not only does it lack a menu but it doesn't have any chapter stops at all.

Yes, there was that. Odd though that the same DVD from different territories actually came with chapter stops.

[nitin]

I think both chapter stops and a chapter selection menu are good and useful features and should not be omitted unless they are surprisingly expensive or time consuming to implement.

[Ste7en]

Originally Posted by MichaelB

Mulholland Drive comparisons are a red herring - as far as I'm aware, BFI and Eureka releases will continue to have skip points.

How so? The DVD didn't have chapters or 'skip points'. I assumed that is what was meant by 'no chapters'.

[tenia]

Originally Posted by Ste7en

How so? The DVD didn't have chapters or 'skip points'. I assumed that is what was meant by 'no chapters'.

What Michael means is that in the case of the quoted MoC or BFI titles, only the chapter menu is missing, but the movies still have chapters so you can use you remote button "next / previous chapter" anyway.

However, it's not the case with Mulholland Drive : if you press "next chapter", you go straight at the last second of the movie, then are sent back to the main menu.


Personnally, I think it's good to keep the chapter menu, especially when you do bother creating chapters on the movie, but I never use them myself (I find it quicker on my PS3 to fast forward x120 and rarely watch a movie in separate sessions) so...

[the blob]

I must admit, I don't often use the chapter menu but I use chapter stops a fair amount so definitely don;t want to lose them. I'm also finding on some discs, although I can't think which off hand, there are too few or poorly spaced stops. I sometimes find myself skipping back thinking I'll get to the start of a long scene or segment and end up being needlessly thrown back an extra 10 mins or more.

[charnier]

It's definitely useful to have when the player, for whatever reason, cannot let the disc resume at the last point where you stopped it - Third Window releases are an example.

[kuro_sawa]

For most films, I don't need chapters. For documentaries I can see the use moreso, or if it was a TV series or something. Otherwise I'm usually watching the full film. I think that if you were a film professor it would irk you to have to fast forward though I agree with Michael on a title like Shoah the seemingly overboard chapter menus are completely useful and we're almost necessary for me, but other than the handful of cases similar I think just having the stops available for the user to skip to with their remote sans menu is fine.

[chip75]

I'm not really bothered if the Chapter Selection menu disappears from the BDs, as long as they keep the marks themselves, usually they're just numbers and pictures and have little meaning. Some have titles for each chapter and they're nice, but it's an art to put the marks in the right place for a movie, often they're in the wrong place. I'd love it if they did them like shooting scripts so you could move through each scene properly (although there were some DVDs with nearly a 100 marks) and with TV titles I like the marks where the commercial breaks would be or at the beginning of the teaser, titles, first act, second act, et cetera.

[ravenus]

It would be nice if Lyris or someone else knowledgeable about disc authoring could talk about how much effort/time goes into making a chapter selection menu (especially Eureka's simple text selection menu, not some fancy menu with video clips), that it's considered a good option to omit them.

[Ste7en]

Originally Posted by tenia

What Michael means is that in the case of the quoted MoC or BFI titles, only the chapter menu is missing, but the movies still have chapters so you can use you remote button "next / previous chapter" anyway.

However, it's not the case with Mulholland Drive : if you press "next chapter", you go straight at the last second of the movie, then are sent back to the main menu.

Ah, right. So it is actually correct to say that MoC / BFI are actually more of a red herring because they still have them, just not a chapter selection menu. Whereas Mulholland Drive (on DVD) just doesn't have them at all... depending on which DVD you have.

FWIW I like the basic menus found on the Japanese Straight Story BD and the first release of Avatar. Just a little bit of animation, a bit music but fast to load etc.

Pop-up menus are also a must IMO. The 88 Films Italian range does my head in!

[chip75]

Originally Posted by ravenus

It would be nice if Lyris or someone else knowledgeable about disc authoring could talk about how much effort/time goes into making a chapter selection menu (especially Eureka's simple text selection menu, not some fancy menu with video clips), that it's considered a good option to omit them.

If it's like creating DVD menus it's not that difficult, theirs will be far superior, but it should be simple enough with authoring software and quite a few labels use the same template on most of their BDs.

Knowing where to place the chapter marks themselves would be far more time-consuming.

The titles in question don't have the chapter selection screen through the pop-up menu? It almost seems like an omission through error and not a choice.

[Ste7en]

Originally Posted by MichaelB

No, I'm saying that it's a red herring to cite Mulholland Driver in this discussion, because that had neither chapters nor skip points at the specific request of its director. By contrast, Eureka and BFI discs still have skip points, and I can't see that changing any time soon.

Right. I was sticking to the thread title 'Do you think a chapter selection menu is useful?' I didn't consider discs still having skip points etc.